Luke Ford

I talk to Colin by phone Sunday afternoon. His new book is called — White Girl Bleed a Lot — The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it.

Colin: “My brother and I host a talk show in Wilmington, Delaware. We saw all this information coming over the newswire about flash mobs in Philadelphia. It didn’t sound right. I looked at it on Youtube and what I saw on Youtube was totally different from what I was reading about in the newspapers. If you looked at it on Youtube, it was a race riot. There was hundreds and thousands of black people on the streets of Philadelphia beating people up, pulling people out of cars, destroying property, threatening police. All nasty stuff.”

“I said this is not a typical kid’s night out. This is a race riot.”

“It kept happening over and over and over again.”

“I thought the world needed a book where people could read it and not deny this epidemic of racial violence.”

Luke: “Is this epidemic new?”

Colin: “I’m not sure. Some people say no. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther leader and the only guy who beat Barack Obama in an election, says this has been happening for a while in the black community and the only reason people are paying attention to it now is that it is spilling into the white community.”

Luke: “Why do you think the news media has been reluctant to write accurately about this?”

Colin: “Everybody’s afraid to talk about race. Nobody wants to talk about racial violence. Wherever your community paper is, pick it up and you’ll see stories about the Black Caucus and black student groups, many of these stories will be written about by the Association of Black Violence, but to talk about black violence is to risk being drummed out of the public square as a racist.”

“Maybe I’m just a guy who has his eyes open. The book asks more questions than it opens. The book says we’re past the point where we can deny this. Because of Youtube and Twitter, we can’t. We might as well start talking about it.”

“I used to be the ghostwriter for the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.”

“Drudge links to these stories but he just links. He doesn’t say what it is and neither do many of the stories. Drudge might link to a story in Philadelphia but the story won’t say that one thousand black people were running down the streets of Philadelphia creating havoc and this is the 20th time this exact thing has happened in the last six months. They’re running out of words to describe people who do this. They’re unruly youths. They’re drunken teenagers. At some point, we’ll have to come to grips that these are black people in these riots.”

“Psychiatrists will tell us that we’re only as sick as our secrets. This topic is so buried, so secret for so many people, it shows how sick racial attitudes are for so many people.”

“There was an incident on the Fourth of July. That’s what the LA Times calls it. There were some people throwing fireworks at police in Watts. I called around. It sounded like there were ten, twenty, thirty people and they ran away when the cops came. That’s what I got from the story.”

“I emailed a firefighter who was Tweeting from the scene. He said there were 300 cops at this incident and 800 black people involved and those numbers did not get any attention in the Los Angeles Times. Eight hundred people throwing explosive devices at police officers is not a story?”

“When you hear about stuff happening in Las Vegas and smaller mid-West towns, some people say those are black people who were driven out of Los Angeles by the Mexican gangs. On the street level, it is nasty out there [between black and latino gangs in LA].”

Luke: “When did you realize you had a book here?”

Colin: “The minute one of the other talk show hosts said that my reporting on the matter was ‘despicable.’ I thought this was worth a book because it is happening all over the country. It’s too juicy.”

Luke: “My perception of America is that the worst thing you can do for your social standing is to say anything that can be regarded as racist.”

Colin: “This is how I avoid that. I don’t generalize and I don’t stereotype. I also don’t apologize. My book is fact driven. There’s nothing in there you could point to and say is racist.”

On July 4, I walked through a black neighborhood south of 18th Street in 90035. I noticed firecrackers going off and several police cars in the area.

Little did I know that in Watts about 700 black youths threw firecrackers at about 300 police and firemen.

The story merited only two benign paragraphs in the LA Times.

Colin Flaherty writes:

In Watts, Calif., a crowd of dozens of black people setting off fireworks at the Nickerson Gardens public housing project did not take kindly to police and firemen who showed up to stop it.

During the incident, the suspects allegedly tossed rocks, bottles and live fireworks at Los Angeles police officers, according to City News Service.

On Twitter, both sides were represented:

A fireman said, “Cops in riot gear and the locals shooting fireworks at the cops pretty funny until u drive through it. … Eh.”

But one of the residents of Watts thought it was funny:

“Niggas in the niccersons had the riot squad out there … throwin fireworks n roccs at police lmfao yall did that fasho,” said @HerFavDrugg.

Several officers were hit by fireworks.

Black economist Thomas Sowell at the Hoover Institute writes: When I first saw a book by Colin Flaherty with the title “White Girl Bleed a Lot,” I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author.

That is because I had encountered that phrase before, while doing research for the four new chapters on intellectuals and race that I wrote for the revised edition of my own book Intellectuals and Society, published this year.

That phrase was spoken by a member of a mob of young blacks who attacked whites at random at a Fourth of July celebration in Milwaukee last year. What I was appalled to learn, in the course of my research, was that such race riots have occurred in other cities across the United States in recent years — and that the national mainstream media usually ignore these riots.

Where the violence is too widespread and too widely known locally to be ignored, both the local media and public officials often describe what happened as unspecified “young people” attacking unspecified victims for unspecified reasons. But videos of the attacks often reveal both the racial nature of these attacks and the racial hostility expressed by the attackers.

Brett Stevens writes: We trust our newspapers, who have a profit interest in reporting things we like to read, to interpret that interest as a mandate for telling the truth as they see it.

However, as we find out with each generation, newspapers often filter “truth” through two sieves to withdraw upsetting information: first, what is politically de rigeur at the time, and second, what their advertisers and vocal interest groups want to hear.

In addition, we are literally drowning in news. There are now thousands of papers, millions of blogs, uncountable podcasts and citizen journalist outfits on the information waves, each thrusting forth its best eye-catching headlines.

Through these two filters, we lose sight of what happens and rely on the spin and opinion-shaping abilities of the news. Scan the big headlines, then see what the pundits say, and find a nice tidy conclusion to seal the deal.

Colin Flaherty, an acclaimed reporter, approaches the news as a giant set of data points. By themselves, these data points are easily lost in the flood or explained away with political or commercial rhetoric.

However, when Flaherty goes through with his highlighter and connects the dots for us, a pattern emerges. This pattern contradicts the “official story” which explains away the pattern in favor of focus on single points, and punditry to justify what happened as not what the pattern says it is.

In this case, he offers a simple thesis: the race riots of the 1920s, 1960s and 1990s have returned, but in a new form. This time, they are micro-riots. Flash mobs, or groups of a few dozen to a few thousand people, emerge spontaneously to rob, assault, batter and steal — but none dare call it a “riot.”

This is not a racist book. Flaherty does not make any conclusions about why this is happening, or blame all African-Americans for the actions of some African-Americans. He does however make two compelling points:

Race riots have returned in the form of flash mobs.
Our media is unwilling to report this but will explain it away.